March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Maryland lawmakers are considering
repealing the death penalty after five other states ended
capital punishment in the last six years.

The House of Delegates is set to vote as soon as today on a
bill that would stop prosecutors from seeking to execute those
convicted of murder, the only crime for which the state allows
capital punishment. The measure passed the Senate earlier this
month and almost half of the delegates in the House are
sponsoring the repeal.

Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley, a potential 2016
presidential candidate, has long sought to abolish the death
penalty. The legislature is also moving toward adopting some of
the nation’s strictest gun laws backed by O’Malley, including
new licensing requirements for handguns, in response to the
December school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Maryland would become the 18th state without the death
penalty. New Jersey, New York, Illinois, New Mexico and
Connecticut since 2007 have abolished executions amid concern
about the cost, racial-bias in its use and the risk of
condemning wrongfully convicted.

“There’s a pretty strong trend away from capital
punishment,” said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the
Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit
that advocates against the practice. “It would be more of a
surprise if it didn’t pass.”

Declining Executions

While Maryland and 32 other states allow the death penalty,
its use has declined nationally over the past decade. There were
78 such sentences handed out last year, down from as many as 315
during the mid-1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information
Center.

In Maryland, the death penalty is rarely used. There are
five people on death row -- three of whom were sentenced more
than 25 years ago -- and only five have been executed since the
early 1990s. The most recent was Wesley Eugene Baker, who was
executed in 2005 for killing a woman in front of her two
grandchildren in a shopping mall parking lot.

Executions in Maryland have effectively been banned since
2006, when a court ruled that the regulatory procedures for
administering them were adopted without required public comment.
The O’Malley administration hasn’t completed regulations that
would allow it to be reintroduced.

O’Malley, who was elected governor in 2006, has argued that
the death penalty fails to deter crime, costs three times as
much as sentencing someone to life without parole, and is prone
to racial bias.

The Catholic Church and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the Baltimore-based civil rights
group, joined the effort to repeal capital punishment.

Jail Murders

During the debate in the Maryland House on March 13, some
lawmakers said the death penalty should remain as a punishment
for crimes such as mass murder and killing children.

“They say it’s no deterrent,” said Maryland Delegate C.T.
Wilson, a Democrat. “It’s not supposed to be, it’s a
punishment.”

Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, a Democrat, said in 2011 he
wouldn’t allow executions during his term, a step that didn’t
need legislation. In January, Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe, a
Democrat, said he would be willing to halt them in his state, if
the legislature approved a bill to do so. Colorado
Representative Claire Levy, a leader of the Democrats, is
planning to advance a bill to do away with it there.

“We will see more states looking to take the same
action,” said Shari Silberstein, the executive director of
Equal Justice USA, a Brooklyn-based group that advocates for
repeal.